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Thursday, July 20, 2017

New DNA Study Suggests African Humans Interbred With European Neanderthals Way Earlier Than We Think

We need to assume that hunting bands from many lineages distributed themselves through all of Eurasia depending mostly on adaptation to the climate. Mobility was never an issue. It only got interesting when large tribes or villages became possible. This allowed a territory supporting n hunting bands of say two dozen individuals at best to suddenly face some of their number to jump in size to around 120 or so.

Bands unable to follow suit simply were absorbed after the population expansion.

We will need thousands of samples before we really police what sort of happened.

Recall that in the Americas, the indigenous population collapsed around five hundred years ago. In coming immigration and rapid intermarriage has largely assimilated the entirety of the original population to the point any long time lineage has native contribution. The natives in pure form are a minority as is true world wide in most cultures. Yet their genetics are in most of us.

Throughout Eurasia it seems simply that neanderthal populations did not adapt to a new life way soon enough..

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New DNA Study Suggests African Humans Interbred With European Neanderthals Way Earlier Than We Think

Phys Org reports
that in 1937, a 124,000-year-old Neanderthal thigh bone was discovered
during excavations near the entrance of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in
southwestern Germany. After 80 years its mitochondrial DNA has been
fully analyzed and suggests that an early wave of modern human ancestors
could have interbred with Neanderthals somewhere between 470,000 and
220,000 years ago.

Nuclear DNA vs Mitochondrial DNA

One of the main reasons scientists have always had trouble to spot
the exact date Neanderthals split with humans has to do with the two
different kinds of DNA in human cells: nuclear DNA and mitochondrial
DNA. The mitochondria and nucleus are two organelles inside a cell that
share many similarities. Both are made of two membranes. These membranes
separate the inside of the organelle from the outside, but have protein
channels that allow things to pass in and out. Both contain DNA
material that carries genes that encode for proteins. Both have genes
that make ribosomes, the machines that read the instructions in RNA to
make protein. The problem, however, is that nuclear DNA suggests humans
and Neanderthals split 765,000 to 550,000 years ago, while mitochondrial
DNA suggests the split took place 365,000 years later, around 400,000
years ago.

An ancient mitochondrial DNA from a 124,000-year-old Neanderthal
thigh bone could resolve the puzzling relationship between modern humans
and Neanderthals. "The bone, which shows evidence of being gnawed on by
a large carnivore, provided mitochondrial genetic data that showed it
belongs to the Neanderthal branch," Cosimo Posth of the Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Human History and lead author of the study,
tells Phys Org.
The genetic data recovered by the research team offers a timeline for a
suggested hominin migration out of Africa that took place after the
ancestors of Neanderthals arrived in Europe, by a lineage more closely
related to modern humans.

That is indeed a very strange scenario that could change the current
narrative of mankind’s history, as from what we know today, humans
didn’t engage in mass migration from Africa, their backyard, to Europe,
Neanderthal territory, until 75,000 years ago. Early human-like DNA
suggests that a female ancestor of modern humans gave birth to a
Neanderthal possibly several hundred thousand years before humans and
Neanderthals were initially believed to come in contact for the first
time. So, could that mean that a small group of archaic humans left
Africa earlier than what we thought, and interbred before the big
migration? The new study published in Nature Communications clearly suggests that theory.

One of the questions rising from this new study, however, is how
these small Neanderthal groups managed to spread all over Europe (from
Spain to Siberia). Joshua Schreiber, a population geneticist at Temple
University who was not involved in the research, is not sure how these
genes could have spread across such a big territory back then. “It’s
hard for genes to move when they don’t have cars and airplanes,” he
tells The Verge,
even though he agrees that the new theory makes a lot of sense and
could reshape human history if further genetic analyses back it up.Furthermore,
Schreiber says that mitochondrial DNA is only a small part of the
larger genetic puzzle and to confirm their analyses, the researchers
will need nuclear DNA as well. What complicates things for the research
team even more though, is that no nuclear DNA has been recovered from
the ancient thigh bone, since it was chewed over by carnivores and
contaminated with modern DNA. Nevertheless, Posth and his team hope that
enough DNA samples may make it possible to retrace humans’ very early
migration even without a fossil record, “We can track the human genes
appearing among Neanderthals. It’s a nice parallelism with what happens
later, with the Neanderthals inside of us,” he tells The Verge, implying that the research will continue for a long time to come.

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18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.